Pukkelpop dances in the Cloud

Next week, the 25th edition of Pukkelpop will take place. Just like the previous years, the organisers of the summer festival got in touch with Combell. Since this year, for the hosting of its website, Pukkelpop uses a Public Cloud solution.

Cloud: add resources as you need them

Cloud Hosting is based on virtualisation technology, which means that resources such as memory, processing power, storage capacity and bandwidth are shared in a cloud of computers. The resources are allocated to the virtual machines that need the capacity at a given moment.

Flexibility as an asset

Cloud Hosting is thus ideal for websites that do not use their entire capacity at any moment. From April, the website welcomes about 15,000 unique visitors a day. But the Pukkelpop website also shows many peak moments, especially during the announcement of the artists and the day before the festival. At those moments, the number of visitors quadruples, with peaks reaching 100,000 unique visitors a day.

So, Pukkelpop does not need the same capacity throughout the year, but it must be possible to change up a gear fast. Availability at crucial moments is also very important.

Managed Cloud

Since Combell takes care of the entire management of the servers, the chance of downtime is about inexistent. In case of disasters, the High Availability function, combined with the Fault Tolerance function, ensures that a new virtual machine is automatically started. Combell has been offering Public and Private Cloud solutions for a while. With a Public Cloud, such as the one that Pukkelpop uses, the customer is connected to our VMware environment. With a Private Cloud, we create a bespoke Dedicated Cloud environment for the customer, based on VMware, Hyper-V or Xen virtualisation technology.

Unlike many international suppliers, Combell focuses on the Managed Cloud model, with which Combell takes care of the entire management, from setup to daily management. We believe that a thorough analysis of the needs in terms of infrastructure is important before creating Cloud servers.

Customers such as Pukkelpop have no time to take care of such things. They prefer to focus – quite rightly – on their core business: the organisation of a brilliant summer festival.